On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 08:22:52AM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > Hi, > > During a recent discussion on debian-devel about multiarch, it was shown > that gzip does not always produce the exact same output from a given > input file. > > While it was shown that removing the requirement to compress > documentation would not solve the issue (i.e., the problem was larger > than just the compressed files), I still think removing the requirement > to compress files is a good thing to do. > > Rationale: > - While I'm sure compressing files would have been a useful thing to do > in the days of 500MB-harddisks, the same is no longer true for today's > hundreds-of-gigabytes harddisks. A simple test[1] shows that the > increase in diskspace is negligible in relation to today's disk sizes. > - In the cases where the increase in diskspace would be significant, > i.e. in embedded systems, the best option is to use emdebian, which > already routinely removes *all* documentation from the system as part > of the modifications they make to Debian proper; so this change would > not impact embedded users. > - Compressing documentation files incurs an additional step on the user > who wants to read said documentation. Yes, there is zless and zmore. > However, there is no ziceweasel, zpdf-reader[2] or zgv. Even if such > tools do exist, we would still require that users either know these > tools exist and how to get them, or to decompress files before reading > them. > > As such, I believe the requirement to compress files is an anachronism > that we should get rid of. > > Thoughts? Good idea, seconded. iustin
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